Basic brick techniques: from stacking to building

15 August

Toddlers love to build towers, and with good reason. It’s a natural part of your child’s development:

Stacking things on top of each other, whether it’s wooden bricks, buckets, sticks, books, LEGO® DUPLO® bricks, kitchen bowls, or food, helps your child discover how they can turn things around them into something else and triggers their imagination. It stimulates your child’s spatial awareness. It takes motor skills to balance things on top of each other, and let’s not forget the best thing about towers: that exhilarating noise they make when they collapse – either when questionable engineering meets gravity, or from a well-directed push!

As toddlers grow, so do the ways they play - and the things they want to build. Houses, castles and other buildings are common next steps for young children to explore and build. Buildings can set the scene for anything from medieval fantasy dramas to comforting and familiar everyday scenarios. But unlike the easily tippable towers, a fort needs to be strong and stable so it won’t crumble under the attack of fiery dragons (or big brothers). Although houses seem simple enough to build, they can help boost your young builder’s cognitive skills and – not least – confidence, as they learn new techniques.

The trick to stable brick building for kids is to make sure the bricks from one row overlap bricks from the next row, and so on. When you build like this, you are not able to remove a single brick without removing others, and this makes your masterpiece stable and strong.

Here you can see an example of a stable build, where the bricks interlock.